Coral Springs’ old City Hall — the brick building where the city’s first residents rode up on horseback to retrieve their mail — will be demolished in June.

The city’s plan: raze it and sell a clean piece of land to a developer as part of a new downtown vision.

“I’m going to hate to see that building go [because of the] historical value,” said Commissioner Larry Vignola. But “we need that area for development. That building served us well. It was only supposed to be a temporary real estate office. The city outgrew that in the late ’70s and, unfortunately, it’s time for it to go.”

It’s part of an ongoing redevelopment effort at the intersection of University Drive and Sample Road, which city officials want to become a downtown area.

The northeastern quadrant, once the site of a Publix supermarket, is still empty, but city officials hope development will eventually happen there. The southeastern corner has offices, as well as the Northwest Regional Library and the Coral Springs Charter School. City officials are trying to find a new location for the school, so they can use the land for something else.

They’re also in talks with the landowners of the shopping plaza east of the old City Hall building, at the northwestern corner bordering University Drive. The hope is to sell that land as well and create one larger parcel to attract a developer.

“We are still meeting with landowners to try to position the corner for a land assemblage for a larger project,” Birdsill said. “We would hope to be able to connect this with the old City Hall site ideally.”

Coral Ridge Properties developed land in Fort Lauderdale and when it ran out of land, it looked west. It built the city of Coral Springs from scratch starting in 1963. Westinghouse acquired the company in 1966 and built "Electra Lab" houses with conveniences such as motion detectors and intercoms. Today the city is still known for its family-oriented neighborhoods and sought-after schools.

(By Lisa J. Huriash)

The land at the southwestern corner, near the new City Hall, would become the site of a developer’s plan to build a hotel with a maximum of eight stories, a grocery store, restaurants, plus retail space, a residential tower of 450 rental apartments and parking garages. The 10-story office building there now, Coral Springs Financial Plaza, will be razed early next year, Birdsill said.

The old City Hall is a colonial-style building that served many uses over the decades.

James Hunt, president of Coral Ridge Properties, which built Coral Springs starting in 1963, had wanted the city to emulate the Old South. So the building for his administrative headquarters — what eventually became City Hall —is modeled after the University of Virginia, featuring pre-Civil War bricks from Atlanta for authenticity. It was built in 1965.

Because there was no local delivery until 1970, residents also went to the Coral Ridge headquarters to pick up their mail.

In recent years, City Hall employees had complained about the building, saying commission chambers were too small, that crowds often overflowed into the hallway, that carpets were mismatched and break rooms were outdated.

Members of the city’s Historical Advisory Committee have walked through the building and plan to save some of the building’s original features: the mailboxes in the mail room dating back to the building’s post office days, some paneling from the front lobby, and the lamps and sconces near the main doorway. Birdsill said this week that some bricks will also be saved.